Chris Lombardi puts defense and security under the spotlight, as he shares his takes on recent NATO and EU cooperation and provides insight into the company’s own long-term strategic partnerships in Europe.

Three trends are currently driving the global electricity sector: decarbonization, decentralization and differentiation. Utilities are making significant contributions to mitigate carbon emissions, while a technology revolution is …

LONDON — I spent last month in the 1990s. My Facebook was flooded with a flashmob of photos of Russian friends as their younger selves, raving at Moscow’s vivacious 1990s clubs, working at Moscow’s vivacious 1990s media or arguing at Moscow’s vivacious 1990s debates. There were many thousands of pics, scanned from pre-smart-phone era snaps, leaving a visual effect where all the off-the shoulder t-shirts, high haircuts, ripped jeans and baggy suits seemed encased under cloudy glass, suspended as if just before a catastrophe.

Inspired by Colta.ru, something akin to a digital Russian New York Review of Books, the project had a distinct political edge (it was accompanied by a lecture series part sponsored by the Yeltsin foundation). The Putinist narrative is built on casting the 1990s as a period of horror, humiliation and chaos, from which Papa Putin managed to rescue his suffering people to restore the Empire (no matter that Putin is utterly a creature of the 1990s, when he made his career and first money). The Facebook flashmob tried to restore another 1990s, or at least open up a broader conversation. It was the first uplifting and infectious stunt liberals had pulled since the anti-Putin protests of 2012.

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But it was also indicative that it was set in the past — the only place of any possible conversation, pro- or anti-Kremlin, now available in Russia. The mark of Putin’s latest presidency is the denial of the present with its economic and countless other problems, and the subsequent loss of any way to formulate a practical vision of the future: If you don’t recognize the reality around you, how can you make a serious argument about how to move forwards? Instead, the Kremlin conjures a bizarre collage of pasts: medieval Orthodoxy cut with Stalinisim and 19th-century geopolitics, all glued together with ageless conspiracies. Even the language of diplomatic cables has resurrected the linguistic constructions of the 1930s.

The denial of reality goes deep. Russia’s political technologists, the curious class of viziers who construct Russian media and politics, have long argued that Russians cannot cope with the real world, and need to live in myths to keep at bay all the traumas from Stalinism through to the fall of the USSR. Since 2012 this idea has been openly embraced even by those whose job it is to report on the real word. Russian news is now essentially a drama where the lines between fact and fiction are utterly blurred, with stories borrowed from drama series: tales of Russian children crucified in the Donbas, or drugged by Ukrainian nationalists to become killing machines, all placed inside a greater historical blockbuster about a World War II that is somehow still being fought against eternally returning fascists.

But, of course, all this isn’t purely a Russian problem.

The West is having its own difficulties formulating a future too. As the EU flies into extreme turbulence the response is retro-nationalist or retro-leftist politics. Donald Trump plays on a Lost American Greatness.

Svetlana Boym, the Russian-American scholar of comparative literature who sadly passed away earlier this year, noted how the age of globalization and advanced information technology is turning out to be an age of nostalgia. The chaos of the new world stimulates a yearning for the old. The new technology is taking us backwards, not forwards, into the warped nostalgias of ISIL or the Soviet Disma-Land of the Donetsk National Republic. This has something to do with the nature of the technology itself. There are so many media-realities now we can’t formulate a common version of the present and thus can’t envision a constructive politics of the future. Instead, all those Facebook posts are by their nature virtual realities, closer to nostalgia than current affairs.

The Russian Facebook 1990s flashmob was part of this, and as I flicked through it I was amused but also saddened. Was this another case of denying the present? The harsh reality is that a week before the 1990s flashmob, the latest attempt for Russian democrats to run in local elections had ended in utter disaster.

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But there’s a slightly hopeful twist. It struck me when I found myself tagged in one of the photographs. I am 15 or so and it must be the early 1990s. Growing up in London, a child of Russian emigrés, I remember watching the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR transfixed to our brown Grundig TV set. All those revolutionary crowds in Eastern Europe then seemed to clamber, Lilliput-like, out of the back of the television set and swell to full size in our little North West London flat, which became a sluice gate for some of the greatest, and drunkest, Russian writers, artists and con-artists on their first visits West (it was one of them who took the picture).

If there was a last time people in both East and West spoke intimately of the present and positively of the future it was then, in those feverish post-Perestroika years. Looking back at those cloudy photos is of course nostalgia. But it is a nostalgia for the last time there was a vision of a future.

Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute, is the author of “Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia” (PublicAffairs, 2014).